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J. G. Ballard Quotes
1930–2009 England
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. Among his most famous books are the controversial Crash, High-Rise and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, all of which have been adapted to film.
England Novelists Science fiction authors Short story writers Also known as: J G Ballard, J.G. Ballard, James Graham Ballard, A User's Guide to the Millenium, A User's Guide to the Millennium, Cocaine Nights
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73 quotes
The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.
High-Rise (1975)
The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world.
My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.
I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
High-Rise (1975)
She's one of those people who flinch from the very idea of happiness — in her mind nothing could be more boring or bourgeois.
Cocaine Nights (1996)
Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge.
People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.
Cocaine Nights (1996)
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot.
Empire of the Sun (1984)
Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense.
The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents".
I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.
Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.
High-Rise (1975)
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
The future rushes towards us like a tennis player charging the net.
Cocaine Nights (1996)
In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
Running Wild (1988)
The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)
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